Give credit to XE for pushing the envelope using noise rendered voluemtrics and constructing their own atmospheric model. I know of another lazy dev that is selling their weather “engine” for 40 USD while still relying on default X Plane cloud and sky textures while promising new ones sometime in 2019-20 which also will come as a separate product!! If Laminar Research dedicated more time into upgrading weather systems by default, devs would have more to work with. We XPL users haven’t even gotten a water depiction upgrade in the XPL 11 cycle

In all fairness, Cpt Kitten has posted videos before showing the aircraft flying through clouds. Another point that needs to be made is that devs are working with the constraints of the X Plane infrastructure that is not yet at Vulkan and where there is a vast difference in performance power from user to user. I can’t blame them for not showing full quality becuase for example a user who runs X Plane on a GTX 680 is not going to have the same performance as one using a GTX1080TI. Devs always have to strike the balance of performance and quality and I assume it can be hard.

If I was a competitor... I’d wrap it up and call it a day. They keep trying to rip off the X Plane community every few months with a new “weather engine” charging 40USD plus for 2D cloud textures that only look good from one angle and inaccurate metar representation. I hope XE 1.10 shuts them all down